Ferdiansyah Thajib - Gender Pluralism “Gone too Far”: The Making of Sexualized Others in Indonesian Public Discourse

Lecture abstract

Gender Pluralism “Gone too Far”: The Making of Sexualized Others in Indonesian Public Discourse
Like many parts of Southeast Asia, Indonesia has a long history of both institutionalized and lived gender pluralism (Peletz 2009). In recent decades, however, feminist and queer movements have increasingly been framed  “kebablasan.” —meaning “gone too far.” Common in critiques of feminism and LGBTQ+ rights, these phrases mark certain bodies and politics as excessive, unruly, and beyond the bounds of social acceptability, casting them as threats to moral and national order. In this talk I explore two key questions. First, how do such narratives reflect broader struggles over the boundaries of gender, sexuality, and citizenship within Indonesia’s increasingly conservative public sphere—complicating the possibilities for gender diversity and rights-based recognition? Second, how do the excess(ed) Others imagine and inhabit otherwise worlds amid structural neglect and ongoing violence?

About the lecturer

© courtesy of Imelda Taurina Mandala

Ferdiansyah Thajib is a Senior Lecturer at Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nürnberg, and a social and cultural anthropologist specializing in psychological anthropology and gender and sexuality studies in Southeast Asia. Beyond academia, Ferdi has been actively involved in cultural production, primarily as an artist, curator, and community educator focusing on the transformative potential of self-organization and alternative pedagogy. These interests are deeply tied to his activism within KUNCI, a transdisciplinary research collective in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, which has been experimenting with ways of producing and sharing knowledge through collective study since its founding in 1999. He is co-editor of Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography (Springer, 2019) and Embracing Faith and Desire: Queer and Feminist Engagements with Islam and Christianity as Lived Religions (Routledge, 2025). His forthcoming monograph, Enduring Otherwise: Muslim Queer and Trans Worldmaking in Indonesia, is scheduled for publication by NYU Press in spring 2026.